SMALL SCREEN Sex: The Revolution! (10 p.m. Monday, VH1) -- From the Kinsey Report to Bill Clinton's stupid cigar tricks, this four-part documentary tracks the upheaval in American sexual mores during the second half the 20th century and its impact on culture and politics.
Hollywood has been trying to make a live-action movie out of Speed Racer since the early 1990s: At one point, Johnny Depp was set to play the hero. But it was The Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski who figured out how to transplant the 1960s Japanese anime TV show into the world of flesh-and-blood while still retaining the colorful palette and outlandish physical action the show was famous for around the world.
Were Larry and Andy Wachowski just really, really lucky when they made The Matrix? Speed Racer, the brothers' live-action, special-effects intensive adaptation of the beloved TV cartoon, is such a dull, clunky, joyless mess, it's hard to believe the people who made it understand much about movies.
The best directors can take on practically any genre, no matter how hoary or formulaic, and turn a film into something dynamic and interesting by approaching it from their particular vantage point. In Redbelt, David Mamet enters the realm of sports drama and Rocky-underdog clichés and discovers it's a surprisingly good fit.
BIG SCREEN Speed Racer (PG) -- In their first film since The Matrix Revolutions, directors Larry and Andy Wachowski turn the TV cartoon staple into the first live-action anime film. Emile Hirsch is Speed, Christina Ricci is Trixie, John Goodman is Pops, and Matthew Fox is Racer X.
Indiana Jones? Check. Batman? Yep. Will Smith? Him too. There will be no shortage of box-office draws during the 2008 summer movie season, which is so loaded with potential blockbusters that it may surpass last year's record-setting summer grosses of $4.15 billion, the highest in Hollywood history.
On the comic-book rack, Iron Man has never come close to achieving the popularity of all-star Marvel Comics superheroes such as Spider-Man or The X-Men. But the character turns out to be a natural for the movies. Unlike the colorful -- and, let's face it, silly -- tights and capes most other do-gooders run around in, Iron Man's gleaming yellow-and-red armor has the sheen and polish of a showroom sports car, and it's loaded with an entire Batcave's worth of trinkets and gadgets. It's a fantastic special...
Were the World Mine closes the 10th Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on a musical, fantastical note. The movie, which director Tom Gustafson expanded from his short film Fairies, takes the familiar scenarios of high school angst and adolescent crushes and gives them a wonderful musical spin, complete with elaborate sets and choreography.
SMALL SCREEN Nanking (7 p.m. Tuesday, Cinemax) -- Germany's crimes during World War II have been endlessly documented, but Japan's much less so -- at least in the West. This documentary on the Japanese army's murderous 1937 conquest of the Chinese city of Nanking could change that. Using archival footage and first-person accounts read by actors such as Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway, Nanking recounts how 20,000 civilians were killed and 20,000 women and children raped in a six-week orgy of...
When the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival was born in 1999, there had been no Brokeback Mountain, no Will & Grace and no L Word. Films that featured gay and lesbian characters in prominent roles were scarce and almost invariably hailed from the independent circuit -- i.e. low budget, scrappy pictures with no recognizable actors.
The good news about My Blueberry Nights, the first English-language movie by director Wong Kar Wai (Chunking Express, In the Mood for Love), is that it delivers the profound visual pleasures that have become part of the filmmaker's signature (the cinematography is by Darius Khondji, who makes a fleeting shot of blueberry pie and melting vanilla ice cream look better than the real thing).
The sight of a chorus of octogenarians singing The Clash's Should I Stay Or Should I Go is odd and enchanting enough to grab anyone's attention (The Clash? Really?). But what makes Young@Heart such an ingratiating experience goes far deeper than the novelty of seeing old people singing hard rock tunes.
When The Visitor opens, 62-year-old economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is already in a profound funk. Walter is a widower. He has lost interest in his students; he has no apparent friends; and he can't even muster the enthusiasm to apply himself to the piano lessons he's taking.
Heartwarming is the operative word in Breakfast with Scot, a crowd-pleasing comedy that makes up for its formulaic, sitcom-ready premise with likable performances and an inviting sense of humor.
CAPSULE REVIEWS
The following capsule reviews were written by Miami Herald movie critic Rene Rodriguez. BEFORE I FORGET (AVANT QUE J'OUBLIE) (Unrated)
BIG SCREEN Baby Mama (PG-13) -- Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey and Amy Poehler star as a successful businesswoman (Fey) pining to become a mother and the South Philly working girl (Poehler) she hires to be her surrogate.
A lot of 10-year-olds are going to come out of The Forbidden Kingdom proclaiming it the best movie ever made. That rapture may not be long-lived -- the summer movie season still awaits, and it is loaded this year -- but the enthusiasm is understandable. This restless, furiously paced fantasy, which marks the first on-screen pairing of martial-arts titans Jackie Chan and Jet Li, overcomes a clunky opening 10 minutes to become a feature-length rush of Saturday-matinee adventure and fun.
One of the things that distinguish great actors from merely good ones is that they can elevate the sorriest of scripts through sheer performance. And like any actor whose career spans more than three decades, Al Pacino has starred in his share of turkeys. But even in the worst of them -- Revolution, say, or Cruising, or Two For the Money -- he gives you someone interesting to watch.
88 MINUTES (R)
One of the things that distinguish great actors from merely good ones is that they can elevate the sorriest of scripts through sheer performance. And like any actor whose career spans more than three decades, Al Pacino has starred in his share of turkeys. But even in the worst of them -- Revolution, say, or Cruising, or Two For the Money -- he gives you someone interesting to watch.
MIAMI DADE COLLEGE
For the fourth time in eight years, the Miami International Film Festival is looking for a director. Patrick de Bokay, who took the festival's reins last February from departing director Nicole Guillemet, has been shown the door by Miami Dade College for unspecified reasons. School officials declined to comment on the decision not to renew de Bokay's annual contract.
Filmmaker David Ayer appears to have made it his life's mission to ensure that the world knows that when it comes to corruption, the Los Angeles Police Department ranks somewhere between the Miami International Airport and a Mexican prison.
This review previously was published last month during the Miami International Film Festival. The inspired pairing of Demi Moore and Michael Caine as a pair of thieves in the diamond-heist semi-caper movie Flawless goes a long way toward overcoming the film's slack, leisurely pacing. Moore and Caine (who previously played father and daughter in Blame It on Rio) have an unusual rapport. The film's period setting -- London, 1960 -- helps, too: Director Michael Radford (Il Postino) and screenwriter...
BIG SCREEN Flawless (PG-13) -- Demi Moore is a diamond company executive in 1960s London trying to no avail to make her way in a male-dominated corporate world. Then a janitor (Michael Caine) offers her a chance to pay back her sexist bosses by helping him steal the stones stashed in the company's vaults.
Scott Smith hadn't even finished writing The Ruins -- and Stephen King had not yet hailed it as ''the best horror novel of the new century'' -- when Hollywood studios started clamoring for the rights to turn it into a film.
The Ruins is, with one major caveat, about as good an adaptation of Scott Smith's bestselling novel as Hollywood was ever going to make. Smith's book -- about a group of college kids who stumble onto a hill in the Mexican jungle where a flesh-eating vine dwells -- was the kind of relentless beach read that seemed tailor-made for the movies, at least until you realized you were dealing with a story about a talking plant that drinks blood.
Shine a Light opens on a note of tension: Director Martin Scorsese is chasing down Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger, trying to find out which song will open the performance he's going to be filming with 11 cameras, each operated by a renowned cinematographer (including Robert Richardson, Emmanuel Lubezki and Albert Maysles, who directed the legendary Stones concert film Gimme Shelter).
In Leatherheads, director George Clooney proves all the Cary Grant/Clark Gable comparisons right by casting himself in the kind of crowd-pleasing entertainment Grant and Gable made throughout their careers. Essentially a screwball comedy with a sports theme, the movie takes a comic look at the birth of America's pro football league in 1925, when players shared the field with grazing cows and a turnout of 20 people was considered by team owners to be a good day.
This review previously was published during the Miami International Film Festival last month. With Snow Angels, 33-year-old filmmaker David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow) leaves his native South and the land of original screenplays to try his hand at adapting someone else's material.
BIG SCREEN Shine a Light (PG-13) -- Martin Scorsese returns to Last Waltz territory with this concert documentary shot during the Rolling Stones' A Bigger Band tour.
The problem with most movies about the Iraq war thus far -- the reason no one went to see Redacted or In the Valley of Elah or Home of the Brave or Lions For Lambs -- is that they've favored messages over characters. If you want to make a film about the soldiers fighting overseas, make sure it's a story about them, not the political beliefs you want to share with the audience.
This review previously was published during the Miami International Film Festival. Befitting a story about marriage, adultery and murder, all the characters in Married Life are constantly lying to each other. Sometimes they even lie to the audience.
DVD SCANS
Southland Tales, director Richard Kelly's follow-up to his acclaimed debut Donnie Darko, premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it was widely derided, and then sneaked into theaters last November in a much shorter and reportedly easier-to-understand cut. It quickly vanished after a few weeks.
BIG SCREEN 21 (PG-13) -- An MIT professor (Kevin Spacey) trains a group of his most gifted students (including Across the Universe's Jim Sturgess and Superman Returns' Kate Bosworth) how to count cards and beat Vegas casinos at their own game. Laurence Fishburne is the casino owner who uncovers their scam. Based on a true story.
Drillbit Taylor may be the latest comedy from the Knocked Up/Superbad gang of producer Judd Apatow and actor/co-writer Seth Rogen, but the film emits a subtle yet distinct John Hughes vibe.
This review previously was published during the Miami International Film Festival earlier this month. La misma luna (Under the Same Moon) is an endearingly sweet fable about a hotly debated subject. Director Patricia Riggen and screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos use a graceful touch and a tender approach to character in this story of a 9-year-old boy (Adrian Alonso) who crosses the Mexico-U.S. border on his own to reunite with his mother (Kate Del Castillo), an illegal immigrant working as a maid in...
ANTHONY MINGHELLA, 54
Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, died Tuesday morning at a London hospital from complications after surgery for tonsil cancer. He was 54.
BIG SCREEN Drillbit Taylor (PG-13): Tired of being picked on by bullies, two kids hire a former soldier (Owen Wilson) to serve as their personal bodyguard. Which only makes things worse.
The only thing wrong with Funny Games -- aside from being nowhere as amusing as its title implies -- is that director Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 German-language thriller can't possibly recreate the experience of watching the original for the first time.
After two excruciating live-action movies (How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat) bad enough to simultaneously sour children off movies and Dr. Seuss for life, the delightful Horton Hears a Who makes a convincing argument that any future Seuss adaptations should be the sole domain of CGI animators.
FILMMAKING
When directors decide to remake one of their own films, it is usually because there was something about the first version that they felt could be improved.
